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Monday, February 15, 2016

Another Wild Spirit

Dog
Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain

by
Martha Sherrill

NY:
Penguin, 2008

What
did I expect when the title Dog Man caught my eye? Some yeti-like legend of
northern Michigan? Perhaps at first glance, but when I picked up the book that
expectation had to be quickly discarded. The dog man of the title was an Akita
breeder in the snow country of Japan.

So,
a tale of dogs set in the North -- much more appealing....

At
home I began reading and found the book once again exceeding expectations,
taking me not only far from home but back in time and to a part of Japan that
was itself far behind the times in Tokyo and other large cities. Dog Man is as much about the
man’s wife, Kitako, and their life together as it is about Morie and his dogs.
The couple marry in 1940 in a Shinto ceremony held at the grand former
residence of General Maresuke Nogi and his wife,

held as paragons of virtue for killing themselves on the evening of Emperor Meiji's funeral.

Immediately
after the wedding, Morie and Kitako, a 20-year-old city girl raised all her
life in comfortable circumstances (she is college-educated with a teaching
degree), set off on a 22-hour train ride to the north where Morie was raised.
Kitako feels out of place in the midst of Morie’s big, noisy family (he is the
youngest boy in a family of five boys and five girls) but is even more confused
by the snow country itself and its primitive isolation, far from the nightclubs
of Tokyo.

...”Where do we go tonight?” she’d asked Morie, who looked at her
with an expression she didn’t understand. It was so cold—still winter, with
snow everywhere, as though spring was hesitant to arrive in such a serious
place. And so dark—no streetlights or city lights, nothing but black sky and
looking black mountains.

To
Kitako’s dismay, Morie turned down a job in Tokyo, choosing instead an
assignment in distant Manchuria, then a new colony of imperial Japan. Had Morie
been happy there, Kitako would have had to endure life in Manchuria much
longer, but neither of them was immune to the resentment of the local
population.

The Japanese expansion into Manchuria had been particularly violent
and the Manchurians, beleaguered and beaten down, carried a strong, lingering
resentment of their conquerors, who were now immigrating in great numbers into
their towns and cities. Kitako was shocked by the way her countrymen behaved in
Manchuria, treating the Chinese like lesser beings, “as if they weren’t really
human,” she says. And when she went to the market, she felt self-conscious,
suspecting that she was hated by the local vendors simply for being Japanese,
and for having money....

Their
first child is born in Manchuria, but after only two years Morie and Kitako,
still without dogs, return to Japan, where Morie will be in charge of building
and running a power plant in snow country, not far from his family home.

The
place name “Pearl Harbor” does not come into this story, but the war does. Due
to circumstances, Kitako must make the long, difficult return trip to Japan
alone with her baby. Resettled at last in snow country, a place of hardship and
poverty, she finds the dialect hard to understand. A young mother, she has no
friends or family in the cold winter world. And life in the north, never
luxurious or easy, is made more challenging by war and rationing. No
electricity, no gas, no hot water – a woodstove for cooking (all kindling and
firewood to be gathered in the woods behind the house) and kerosene lamps for
light. But when the firebombing of Tokyo begins, Morie brings members of
Kitako’s family to the north to live with them, and Kitako sells her wedding
kimono for enough money to buy three days’ worth of rice.

But
into these dark, hard times of struggle comes Morie’s first dog.

Nobody talked about the thing in the woodshed—the creature that was
now eating six pounds of food a day—or said anything directly to Morie about
his dog. Morie never raised the subject either. He fed it quietly, walked it
quietly [in the dark of morning and dark of evening], and tried to keep it out
of sight. Actually, he wasn’t sure if his in-laws even knew about it. But they
knew. They all knew. And they were speechless with disgust. You weren’t
supposed to feed dogs when people were starving. You weren’t supposed togive dogs rice when your family got only potatoes.

It
went beyond that: possession of dogs was illegal at that time in
Japan. But Morie, who had never had a dog in his life, was seized by a “sense
of mission.” He made discreet but careful investigations and estimated that
only sixteen Akitas, so long the pride of the snow country, had survived the
years of extreme hardship and prohibition against dogs. The breed was close to
extinction. His mission, as he saw it, was to save the breed and return it to
its former glory.

Who
can say what inspired his love for these dogs? Something in them called to
something in him.

After
the war, life became easier and more pleasant. Morie applied his engineering
inventiveness to the growing family’s wilderness home, bringing hot water into
their lives. Their traditional Japanese soaking tub with hot water was
available to all guests and neighbors. The hospitality of the house became
legendary, and Kitako learned from local women how to prepare regional dishes
life was no longer lonely. Her life was no longer lonely.

As
for Morie, a Mitsubishi supervisor, who earns his salary by electrifying rural
Japan, his passion, more and more, is dogs. Akitas. Acquiring dogs and puppies,
learning about them, breeding and raising and showing and talking about Akitas
with other dog owners and breeders. Had his character been different, Morie’s
obsession might have become, as it did for so many others in Japan at this
time, all about increasing his personal wealth and prestige.

But
Morie made a decision early on: he would never sell a dog. He gave dogs away,
he traded a puppy for stud service, and he loaned dogs--sometimes for the dog’s
lifetime. But he would not sell a puppy or a dog, nor would he let one go to a
stranger.

Each
chapter in Dog Man
has for a focus one particular dog. Anyone whose life has been blessed by dogs
will understand the reason: the succession of dogs marks epochs in the owner’s
life. There was Manchuria, without dogs. There were the war years, bringing the
first dog. And so on. The author understands and builds on this way of marking
time so that Morie’s engineering career, his wife’s life at home, their growing
family, additions and expansions to the family home – an entire way of life in
the faraway snow country at that time in rural Japan – are all, beautifully and
naturally, revealed and integrated into the story. The early illustrations in
the book show only dogs, later ones a few people, but the houses and forests
and mountains of the snow country life we must (and do) imagine from the
author’s richly detailed descriptions.

One
of my favorite individuals in the story is Uesugi, the matagi, or migratory
hunter-forager and “forest inspector” in a tradition older than samurai. Uesugi
becomes a regular visitor to Morie and Kitako’s home in Kamaguchi, where
Morie’s work had taken them in that period of their lives.

Uesugi came by quite often that autumn, until the deep winter snows
in December drove him away, farther south. He traveled all the way to Osaka
then, on foot, in his tabi and snowshoes, migrating from
snowy forest to snowy forest, sleeping in abandoned bear caves and beside
fallen trees. His clothing grew heavier and more eccentric: fox pelts around
his neck, wool scarves wrapping his head, a wide-brimmed hat with rabbit fur
earflaps. He carried a shotgun inside his coat, a knife at his waist, and a
fishing hook and line curled in a pocket. And in the fabric pouches that he
slung over his shoulder, he kept dry rice, miso, toasted green tea, shavings of
ginseng, and chunks of kumanoi—the dried gall bladder of a Moon
Bear.

Only
Uesugi can still find wild ginseng in the forests. Uesugi has the best kumanoi to slice sparingly
into green tea. And other than visits to the various mothers of his children,
the only house he sleeps in that of Morie and Kitako. Although Uesugi is
practically a wild man, Kitako feels a connection to him from the first, and he
recognizes both husband and wife as kindred spirits from the start.

Morie
himself, a native of snow country, becomes more at home in the wilderness every
year, with Uesugi as his mentor. Although largely responsible for the region’s
modernization, as time goes by Morie values more and more the wildness of the
country that is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

...He’d be gone for days sometimes. He slept in snow dens and built
fires in caves. He pole-vaulted across creeks and ponds with tree branches. He
studied the differences between poisonous wild mushrooms and the edible
varieties.... He tracked rabbits and deer and learned to catch fish using the
maggots inside the bark of a beech tree for bait.

Everybody else had gotten faster and busier. Morie had gotten
slower and more single-minded. And while modern life seemed more complicated
but more convenient, Morie had gravitated to the essential and the difficult.
He craved the natural world, the mysteries of its woods and groves and meadows,
the primal focus of the hunt, and the company of dogs.

His life was changing as much as anybody’s had, but seemed to have
gone in the reverse direction.

His
life altered by dogs and the matagi, Morie becomes more and more himself with the
passing years.

At
the book’s beginning, we found Morie and Kitako rising in the dark, at 2:15
a.m. on a morning in late May to “open the mountain,” an old religious
tradition now become part of popular culture. They have gotten up earlier on
this festival day every year, because Morie likes to be first at the snow line,
and this year Kitako, his 83-year-old wife, will be with him, along with Shiro,
a 13-year-old Akita.

I
write this post before reaching the end of the book. If Morie is still alive
today, in 2016, he would be 100 years old. Not impossible.

Eventually,
I will reach the last page and close the book, and sometime later I’ll search
online to see if I can find anything about Morie and Kitako after 2008. But for
now I am content, in the dark of my own northern winter morning, to be sharing
one couple’s unfolding life with dogs in the wilderness of the legendary
Japanese snow country. I am in no hurry to come to the end of their fascinating
story.

3 comments:

Deborah, I'm glad you'll be able to get the book. I have discovered it too late to order the $16 paperback for Dog Ears; it's no longer in stock at my distributor warehouses.

Here's another voice in praise of the book (someone who has trouble leaving comments on the blog and sends them to me as e-mail):

"Your review brought back this lovely book to me. It’s been a while since I read it, but within the last year—I had forgotten some details that you mention——yet it was the dog breed that fascinated me most. I know the Akitas, and have also read about the Snow Country—several books recently, actually (was it Into the Far North or something like that?) (Yes, a relatively contemporary British woman tracing Basho’s walk into the far north long ago)——my interest seemed to have focused on the dog, the breed, the near extinction and the unique character of Morie———all so fascinating.

"We can be thankful for him. And those war years were interesting, and that remote country, all shaping a large characterization in my mind. And have read about the fire bombing—was it Jack London, about an American pilot who baled during the fire bombing, and made it out of Tokyo, and somehow escaped on up through the country, slowly sort of going mad. Pretty crazy book. But leaves images. Anyway—am delighted to see your review of this excellent book."